The Asus Zenbook Prime UX31A recently hit the market and interestingly stands out from the rest of the Zenbook crowd with a jet black aluminum color. Ever since Asus fired up their UX Ultrabook series, the devices have been styled in silver and grey. Not only is it a looker, but it’s also a solid deal at $1099 for a 1080p display and 128GB SSD.

We knew Asus was eventually going to launch touchscreen versions of the UX21A and UX31A, but they nearly slipped this launch under our radar. The new color makes us think that Asus wants to position the Zenbook Prime UX31A Touch as their premiere Ultrabook — which they had already done previously with the ‘Prime’ designation, but I suppose they wanted to set the touchscreen model apart from the rest. The 11.6-inch UX21A doesn’t appear to yet be available in a touchscreen model.

Some official info that we dug up says that there should be a model equipped with the faster Core i7-3517U, but we’ve yet to find it available anywhere.

The Zenboook / UX series has been well regarded in the Ultrabook world thanks to great build quality. Our only gripe with the UX31A Touch is that it’s lacking in the port department. We would have preferred to see the Asus UX32 chassis in use which bumps up the HDMI port from micro to full, and adds an additional USB 3.0 port.

If you don’t mind the miniaturized ports then this is definitely an Ultrabook that should be on your touchscreen list. We think the black color looks pretty sleek, how about you?

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I am sure you must know BestBuy has had this since last October, it is anything but new.

Ben Lang

Are you sure they were selling that far back? We knew about it back then, but Asus has been really slow on the draw when it comes to getting new Ultrabooks to market.

We’ve had it in our database for months. We know it didn’t /just/ go up for sale, but we wanted to let people know that it is indeed now selling as this is the first time it came to our attention. The black color is interesting as well — in some of the early reviews they weren’t even black (must have been pre-production models!) and that is shown on reviews as recently as February.

Don

Yes, I bought my first from them on October 26th which I reurned because the chassis was warped and didn’t lie flat.

diego

What other retailers are selling this device?
Ive been wanting the Microsoft store to have it

I bought this ultrabook at Best Buy on Jan 2 (and am using it right now).

I bought a Microsoft mouse on Jan 3rd because the touchpad is so bad and if I could get a bigger battery I would do that as well because the battery life is nothing to brag about. Aside from that it is a really nice laptop, great display, very fast and contrary to many other review, I like the keyboard a lot.

The 4gb of RAM is going to be a problem for people doing a lot of things at one time. I get “low memory messages” and things start going wonky.

Aah, finally an alternative to the black Samsung 900X3C. But wait, the 900X3C is roughly 300 grams lighter, somewhat thinner, has a narrower bezel, better touchpad, really matte screen with great blacks and an ethernet port.